When feedback contradicts itself, the answer is usually neither

Every founder eventually hits the week where two smart people, both of whom they respect, give them flatly contradictory advice about the same decision. One says go broader, one says niche down. One says raise prices, one says lower them. One says this is the right market, one says you're aiming at the wrong customer entirely. Both of them mean it. Both of them have reasons. And the founder spends the next week paralyzed because they can't tell which one is right.

Neither one is right, usually. That isn't a hedge. That's the answer.

When two thoughtful people look at the same situation and reach opposite conclusions, what they're almost always reacting to isn't the situation. They're reacting to their priors. The person who tells you to go broader is the person who has watched startups die from niching too far. The person who tells you to niche down has watched startups die from staying too broad. Their advice has very little to do with you and almost everything to do with the last lesson they took out of someone else's company. When you average two strongly held opposite priors, what you get isn't the truth. What you get is the noise.

The useful thing in contradictory feedback isn't the advice. It's the disagreement itself. Two smart people disagreeing means the decision is genuinely ambiguous from the outside, which means the answer is going to come from information neither of them has. That information is yours. You know what your customers actually said this week. You know what your product can actually do. You know what your runway lets you try. The decision belongs to you because the information that resolves it's also yours.

When you next get contradictory advice, stop trying to figure out which advisor is right. Ask instead what specific piece of information would tell you the answer, and then go get that information. It's almost never as hard to get as the question of which advisor to believe.

This connects to a question I answer in depth: What should I build next as a solo founder and Should I build this feature or talk to customers first.